Redefining CRM: From Sales Platform to Customer Experience Powerhouse

Here's a reality check that should concern every business leader: According to IDC, only 24 percent of organizations have access to fully integrated customer data across their technology stack. That means 76 percent of companies are operating with fragmented systems that make seamless customer experiences impossible.

This isn’t just a technical limitation—it's a customer experience crisis that's costing businesses loyalty, revenue, and competitive advantage every day. Sales teams can’t see service histories, support agents lack insight into customer intent, and fulfillment is often disconnected from the promises made upstream. The result? Customers feel unknown, unsupported, and frustrated at the moments that matter most. The choice is clear: continue operating with fragmented, sales-centric CRM and watch customers drift to competitors who truly know them, or invest in full-life-cycle systems that turn customer data into customer devotion.

The True Cost of Fragmentation

Despite decades of evolution and billions in investment, CRM remains stubbornly rooted in sales. Most solutions are built primarily to store customer information and track sales activity and pipelines. This sales-centric approach creates a fundamental disconnect: while customer relationships span the entire journey from discovery through renewal, legacy CRM tools treat the sale as the finish line rather than the starting point.

When customer data lives in silos—marketing systems here, support tools there, billing platforms somewhere else—every interaction becomes a gamble. Consider a customer reporting inconsistent service to their telecom provider. In a fragmented system, they’ll be transferred between departments, forced to repeat their story multiple times, and left wondering if anyone actually understands their situation.

This structural problem creates a cascade of failures that compounds across the customer journey:

• broken handoffs between sales, service, and operations;
• context loss that forces customers to restart conversations;
• reactive service that addresses symptoms rather than underlying needs; and
• missed opportunities for upsell, retention, and loyalty building.

In today’s experience-driven economy, this disconnect between how CRM is designed and how customers actually engage with brands is becoming a growing liability.

The companies winning customer loyalty today are those that make every interaction feel effortless, informed, and valuable. They've recognized that customers don’t care about internal organizational charts, they want to feel known and supported regardless of which department they’re engaging with. This need to provide thoughtful, personalized, informed service is an area where agentic AI can make a major impact.

AI Agents: The Orchestration Layer

Here’s where the technology becomes transformative. Unlike simple, rule-based automation, AI agents can act autonomously across departments to manage handoffs and resolve complex requests in real time. They don’t just support frontline engagement activities—they orchestrate workflows across the entire customer journey.

When that same telecom customer reports service issues, AI agents can route the inquiry, verify account status, check for missed payments, run diagnostics on local network performance, and coordinate across billing, service, and technical operations, all while keeping the customer informed and eliminating transfers. These capabilities transform CRM from a static system of record into a dynamic system of action.

Similarly, at Pure Storage, AI-powered customer service is driving faster resolutions, reducing case volumes, and delivering more proactive service without requiring customers to repeat information or navigate multiple channels. Pure Storage now responds to customer queries 4.5 times faster and resolves issues 7 times quicker than before. By applying AI to better understand customer environments and anticipate risks, the team now proactively identifies and opens 72 percent of support cases—before customers even realize there’s a problem. The result is elevated efficiency and loyalty through truly connected customer experiences, and there’s still huge potential to push the boundaries even further by automating the entire process with AI agents.

The Unified Platform Imperative

However, AI agents can only orchestrate end-to-end workflows if the business is structured to support them. This requires connecting all departments and functions in a way that reflects how customers are serviced throughout the business.

Previous attempts to solve fragmentation have fallen short because they've focused on incremental improvements—bolting AI onto legacy systems, automating dashboards, and streamlining individual workflows. These approaches haven't changed the core structure where marketing, sales, service, and operations each run on different tools, different metrics, and different workflows.

An AI-first, full-life-cycle CRM strategy demands greater operational alignment. When systems are connected and AI agents have full context, they can resolve issues regardless of where an interaction begins or ends. Behind the scenes, they pull data from every corner of the business—billing, logistics, product support—to ensure customers never have to repeat themselves or restart processes.

From Interface to Intelligence

What makes this shift so significant is that AI agents are becoming the primary interface between customers and your business capabilities. They dynamically surface insights, take action, and interact on customers' behalf. CRM evolves from something agents use to interface with customers, to something that actively supports the entire workflow and relationship.

This changes everything about omnichannel engagement. Being present across channels isn't the same as being connected. Customers expect unified, consistent experiences that don't require multiple touchpoints or repeated explanations, whether they're talking to humans or AI.

Forward-looking organizations are shifting from a digital mindset to an AI mindset—one where technology doesn't just automate tasks but orchestrates entire customer journeys with full context and intelligence.

The Competitive Imperative

We're at a turning point. The companies that will lead in the years ahead are those that treat CRM not as a sales tool or departmental system, but as the strategic foundation for orchestrating meaningful, connected customer experiences across every stage of the journey.

Organizations embracing this approach are seeing gains in speed, accuracy, and their ability to personalize at scale. Their systems adapt in real time, learning from interactions and continuously improving how they support both internal teams and customer needs.

If the first CRM revolution was about digitizing the sales process, the next is about transforming the entire customer experience. The shift has started, and the benefits are showing up in increased productivity, faster revenue cycles, and more resilient customer relationships.

Michael Ramsey is GVP, product management, CRM, and industry workflows, at ServiceNow, working to enable organizations to create seamless customer experiences and drive customer loyalty. In this role, he is responsible for strategy and execution throughout the product life cycle, including managing strategic partnerships, investments, and M&As. He has more than 20 years of experience as a product manager, solution architect and software consultant. Prior to ServiceNow, Ramsey served as chief product officer at Leanplum and Invoice2go, and he also served as SVP of product management at Salesforce, where he was responsible for the Service Cloud product